I think it's a good move since it seems like the pace of development of FreeBSD has increased in the past few years while technology of CVS is aging. The KDE project made the switch from CVS to Subversion about 3 years ago and it seems to have served them well. It seems like there will be a considerable amount of time for transition, but I hope they decide to move everything else over to Subversion too (ports, etc.). I think that would be less hassle than dealing with two systems.

Judging from the mailing list, it's not as if it's going to be that quick or drastic a move. Someone asked where is the documentation, and the answer was basically, it will come after we work out the bugs. (That's a GROSS oversimplification, but point being that though the move is in the works, for the moment, csup and such work, and when the change really happens it will be documented.)

As it is FreeBSD, one does think that the instructions for using it will be documented and when the change works well, people will be notified.
This isn't (excuse the little bitterness) RedHat where they remove a default named.conf and don't bother telling anyone.

For normal users of FreeBSD, nothing has changed. You can still use csup/cvsup to update the ports tree and the source tree. You can still use http://cvsweb.freebsd.org to browse the source tree and review commit logs. As far as using FreeBSD goes...it's still the status quo.

If you are a FreeBSD committer, then things change. Now, commits go directly into SVN, and an automated process copies the commit into the CVS tree.

So, unless you are developing software for FreeBSD, that will be committed into the FreeBSD source tree, and you already have (or will be getting one soon) a commit bit, then nothing has changed.

From what I saw on the mailing lists, it seems that the eventual aim is to move it all over. However, as phoenix wrote, at present, the old ways work.

The topic started on the list when someone asked about documentation for it.
The general impression that I got from the answers was that it's still not quite ready for prime time, but when it is, proper user documentation will be done.

I for one would _love_ seeing SVN brought into the base system and put to work in maintaining the system.

FreeBSD has always felt as if it was self sustaining to me, coming with editors, versioning system, C compiler+debugger, kernel debugger, documentation for system calls/stdlib/library/kernel routines, the ncurses library and some friends, just about every thing you need to work on FreeBSD that you could ever want short of syntax highlighting in nvi and nex.

I think if Subversion were brought into the base, it would be only the client tools. The stuff you'd need to check out a source tree, work in a source tree, and check in changes. There's wouldn't really be a need for the full Subversion server to be in the base.